Zanzibar!

Kids playing in cardboard boxes is apparently univeral. These guys were playing in the alley where our guest house was.
Look closely, there is a man shimmying up this 100 ft tree to snag us some coconuts for our lunch at the end of our spice tour. The only tool he used to help himself was a piece of cloth that he put around the outside of the tree that he held on to while he moved his legs up. It was crazy.

Our Transportation

My pre-creepy rastafarian man view of the Indian Ocean from the Stone Town beach.

I LOVED my time on the island of Zanzibar. In fact I think I could have stayed there for the whole three months of my trip and never gotten sick of it.

Zanzibar is an island of 700,000 people that lies about a two-hour ferry ride (on the fast ferry) from Dar es Salaam. It used to be it's own sovereign nation, but is now a part of Tanzania. It has a fascinating history, full of slave trading, spices, and Arab influence. The Sultan of Oman (a country bordering Saudi Arabia to the south) actually moved his residence to Zanzibar at one point because all of his riches were made there. Where did the money come from? The slave trade.

The slaves that Americans are used to hearing about are the ones who were taken by boat from the western coast of Africa to the new world to work as laborers for the elites throughout North and South America (and it is interesting to note that at every point along the Atlantic coast in every country in North, Central, and South America, there are black communities left over from the time of slavery). In the eastern part of Africa, slaves were taken east rather than west and traded by the Arabs. They were sold throughout the Arab countries and even as far as India for quite some time. The reason that there are few visible traces of this form of slavery in these countries is that the slaves were not allowed to marry and procreate, even to the point of sterilizing slave men. This kept the trade very active as the supply continually needed to be replaced, whereas in the Americas, slave populations were built up through family systems at a certain point more so than the international trade.

The Lutheran Junior Seminary where we stayed in Morogoro was actually a stopping point on the slave trail to the coast. They have the biggest tree I have ever seen in my life on the campus (the one featured in my Ugly Skirt post) and when they first started developing the land, they found shackles at the base from where they would keep the slaves before they headed up through the Uluguru mountains on the same road we took to the wedding.

Now that I've bored you with my history lesson, here are some reasons why I love Zanzibar!

1. You get to spend two frickin hours on a boat with the wind in your hair and salt water from the Indian Ocean splashing in your face to get there! I could have died happy right then and there. We passed lots of little islands with sandy beaches and little wooden boats with local fisherman that looked about ready to capsize at any point. There was plenty to take in.

2. The call to prayer. I have never been to an Islamic country before (Zanzibar is 98% Muslim because of the Arab domination of years past) and the moment we stepped off the boat we were in a different world. Our hotel was across the alley (so about four feet away) from a mosque, so every morning at about 6am we were awoken by the first call to prayer of the day. It came from a speaker system directly facing my window, so there was no chance of missing it! I have no idea what they were saying since it is in Arabic, but it was beautiful. There was just something so mystical about the tone of it, to the point that it actually made me want to get out of bed at 6am to go pray. I now wish the Lutherans had a call to prayer, but I don't think it would sound nearly so cool in the Lutheran mother tongue of German.

3. There were cats EVERYWHERE. It is an island full of cats, and mostly ones with calico spots like one of my very own at home. These weren't the mangy, half-starved variety that you see on the streets at home either. They feed their street cats most liberally on this island of seafood. At night we would go down to the shore and buy some surf and turf. Since I had absolutely no intention of eating any of my squid, octopus, lobster, prawn, etc (it cost pennies and was cooked right in front of us on an outdoor grill) I sat by the water and made friends with the whole feline neighborhood. Just about every tourist and local there was sharing their food as well, about seven purring cats per person.

4. Never being far from the water is enough to keep me happy. It's really all it takes.


We got to go on a spice tour where our guide basically hacked off pieces of ever tree and bush we passed for us to taste. Now I know were lemon, ginger, cloves and probably most other spices in the world come from just by chewing on their leaves. We also got to drink a lot of juice straight from the coconut after watching a man cut them out of a tree for us. My definition of fresh has been forever changed!



The area that we stayed in is called Old Stone Town and was absolutely gorgeous. All of the buildings in Tanzania looked dirty (and I am not even talking about the ones made out of mud) but all of the buildings in Stone Town were made out of some sort of white stone and had lots of extra masonry work done to make them look extra fancy and regal. They were old and from a whole different world than that of mainland Tanzania. This is where the Arab influence is so evident. There were hardly any streets in Stone Town which is really connected by an elaborate system of alleyways. We were lost constantly. We walked in circles for an hour one night, turning this way and that through the maze of alleys barely a yard and a half wide, dodging the people zipping by on scooters all the while. Owning a car there would be pointless.



Although the people there were still black, their skin tone was very different --lighter and somehow a little murkier. I had a hard time stopping myself from staring at people because I found them to be so incredibly beautiful. Although there aren't many Arabs left now, you can see that their bloodlines are still very much there. The women mostly wear headscarves, although most of them dressed like a typical Tanzanians as to the rest of their bodies rather than wearing the long robes that women is some Islamic countires do..


There were lots of other adventures like me trying not to throw up on a beach for the better part of an evening while my group sat on a fancy deck above me eating our first good western food in a month. This was at Mercury's, which is named after Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen. He happens to have been a native Zanzibari, although his parents were Persian. I had a pleasant enough time calming myself down by watching the sun set over the harbor, but when a rastafarian man kept asking me to go fishing with him, I had to retreat back to Dr. Stickert and spent the rest of my time feeding the cats who were down below with me everybody elses leavings.